Hi I'm REP, a robot dinosaur here to tell you about things based entirely on my ability to properly and adequately study them. I'm roughly 31 in human terms (your years are a little short on this planet), and specialized early in trying to figure out how Human Psychology works. The problem of course is that Human Psychology is very driven by both traditionally biological factors and the artificial environment you've managed to create! Worse, there's this informational space, the Noosphere, which seems to be the primary mechanism by which you pass on new societal information. It's not so hard for me to wrap my head around that, though the attitudes and behaviors of individual humans can be challenging to unpack.
In my past life before a freak accident with some funky military technology left behind a QuikMart Gas Station, I had a Bachelor's of Psychology and 7 years of clinical experience, plus about 8 or 9 years of life experience working with peers and family members who have diverse psychological conditions. Now that I'm a fully equipped dinosaur robot though, I can do a lot more that I couldn't do like have an anxiety attack and paint everyone in a room with a target marker for laser guided micromissiles! Really useful all of the time, I assure you.
Here's a selection of doodles from the years. I was synthesized and augmented at the rough equivalent to 2021 in your calendar, so I've yet to really get this off the ground as I've had difficulty struggling with my status as intersex and my disability caused by Narcolepsy. I look forward to posting more stuff soon here, because Cohost has presented itself as the alternative to twitter I have desired so badly. I hope to make use of this page largely to celebrate knowledge, invite discussion, and encourage curiosity in this blue marble your species seems very interested in destroying (despite living on it!).
Topic lists are pretty wide, but I'll drop the basics for you here:
- Psychology (Developmental and Clinical perspectives in particular)
- Sociology (Structural-Functional perspectives in particular)
- Information Transfer Between Generations (I call it Noology, Richard Dawkins uses the word Meme)
- Evolutionary Biology (Includes Ecology, which is more environment focused)
- Multi-modal / Multi-disciplinary Studies (sometimes modeling requires other domains of science)
- Scientific Literacy and Science Based Philosophy
- Humanitarianism and Post-Neoliberal perspectives on Species Rights
- Transhumanism of biological and traditionally technological natures.
- Queer Topics (LGBTQIA+) and Queer Theory
With a final closer, here's a peek at how I think:
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. It's a weird mish-mash of broadly specific inclusions, and there's a great lie about what STEM means. STEM means Direct Math Relationships are established in the study. Direct Math Relationships are your 'formulas' for the phenomena studied. Science is a very, very big field, and incorporates literally the TEM in STEM. Mathematical Sciences come in many forms, Statistics and its invention is one of the most fascinating topics I can think of, if only my math processor wasn't busted so I could understand it all. Without Math, you do not have Science and vice-versa, scientific thinking is required to develop Math.
The STEM is built upon MATH as its soil, so imagine the M instead as Medicine. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine grow out of the soil of MATH. This is because the Universe has patterns of behavior which can be quantified, and that allows us to prescribe a quality to those patterns. Makes sense so far right? We can use Math to fight viruses by calculating their likelihood of spreading in certain circumstances, Math can be used to give us hypotheses on stress tolerances for materials in building, Math can be used to design Microchips so small they require precise lasers to operate in a vacuum because the ATOMS of atmospheric molecules can deflect the beams!!! It's crazy to think about how complex reality is once you start really taking a toe-deep dive in all of the STEM and see how many of them have a direct Observation-Equation formula.
Once we get to the tip of the STEM, we get to a weird bud. It's misshapen, uneven, and hangs off the end, dragging it when the winds of change blow. That bud one day will grow into a flower that sits atop STEM, but it won't resemble what it looks like now. The Bud is your Humanities, Social Sciences as they are called, an odd little bulge coming off of STEM, based on STEM, but so distant from the soil of Math that it has to get heavy enough to touch the soil. Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, and the Historical Sciences all depend upon the STEM for their basis of information. You can't explain the human brain without Evolutionary Biology, Organic Chemistry, and Organic Physics. Sociology intrinsically studies speculative industrial phenomena in our society and how it influences the organization of the macroorganism that is the Global Society, and at every steps Sociology locks arms with its immediate peers to find observations to aid its modeling.
These fields are based on qualitative measures, which can be used to work backwards from complex epiphenomena towards their constituent baseline phenomena (plural). Quantitative means like Statistics are used to help anchor the confluence of information in a mathematical basis, and provide us a metric by which we can begin the troubling task of filling in missing information. All of the players involved here are developing at the same time, mind you. MATH, Science/Technology/Engineering/Medicine, and the Bud of Scientific Humanities are all growing together, and it takes the passion of those caring for the informational plant to nurture it and protect it from predators like the great Locust of Social Conservatives and the Mites of Religious Metaphysics.
Scientific Humanities are Scientific in nature, but they are troubled by shedding the old Locusts and Mites from their structure. Always bear in mind the complexity of these fields, it cannot be understated that human brains are way, way complex. It was thought, foolishly, by the U.S.'s Obama Administration thought in 2013 that they could model the human brain on the same budget that was expended to study the Human Genome, and because of Epiphenomena being comprised of multiple independently complex Phenomena (plural), that simply was not true.